Ubuntu
chromium-browser package

Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc and /usr/share/javascript

Bug #1955325 reported by enz
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
snapd
Confirmed
Low
Unassigned
chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Low
Unassigned
firefox (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Both Firefox and Chromium in Ubuntu 21.10 cannot open files in /usr/local/doc and show a File-not-found error. IMO this is a bug because this directory often contains HTML files from locally installed software that now cannot be browsed with these HTML browsers anymore.

The cause is probably the apparmor configuration in /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap.firefox.firefox, which contains a read permission for /usr/doc, but not for /usr/local/doc.

Paul White (paulw2u)
affects: chromium (Ubuntu) → chromium-browser (Ubuntu)
Revision history for this message
Olivier Tilloy (osomon) wrote :

There is a snapd interface for this (system-packages-doc¹), but it only grants read access to /usr/share/doc, not /usr/local/doc.

I wonder if the snapd folks would be interested in extending the interface to grant read access to /usr/local/doc, too?

¹ https://snapcraft.io/docs/the-system-package-doc-interface

Changed in chromium-browser (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in firefox (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Ian Johnson (anonymouse67) wrote :

Read-only access to /usr/local/doc seems fine to me, should be pretty straight forward to extend the system-package-doc interface to also allow this directory too, only question would be if it should instead be a new interface like user-package-doc or something, but we can sort that out in a PR I think

Changed in snapd:
status: New → Confirmed
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
enz (markus-enzenberger) wrote :

There is a typo in the title: the directory in question is /usr/local/share/doc, not /usr/local/doc.

Olivier Tilloy (osomon)
summary: - Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/doc
+ Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc
Revision history for this message
Paride Legovini (paride) wrote : Re: Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc

I believe access to /usr/share/javascript should also be allowed, as several -doc packages shipping HTML documentation load javascript resources from there. See for example

$ apt rdepends libjs-mathjax | grep -- '-doc$' | wc -l
1246

Paride Legovini (paride)
summary: - Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc
+ Firefox cannot open files in /usr/local/share/doc and
+ /usr/share/javascript
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